The fate of cardboard boxes in the US rests in the hands of consumers more than it ever has been before. In the past, brick-and-mortar retailers handled much of the leftover packaging from shipments. Malls and grocery stores usually send big bales of used but relatively clean cardboard to recycling programs so that they can be made into new boxes. Now, the rise of e-commerce, which started before the pandemic, has shifted more responsibility onto shoppers to properly dispose of boxes so that they can be recycled. Boxes are piling up on residential curbsides instead of at retail stores.
Trash cans from the barn where we keep animal feed.
Taken on Tuesday January 16, 2007 at Trash.
Lead interferes with the body’s battalion of antioxidants, damaging NA and killing neurons. Neurotransmitters, the chemical paperboys of the brain, stop delivering messages and start murdering nerve cells. Lead inhibits the brain’s development by stonewalling the process of synapse pruning, heightening the risk of learning disabilities. It also weakens the blood-brain barrier, a protective liner in your skull that blocks microscopic villains from infiltrating the brain, the result of which can lower IQs and even cause death. Lead poisoning is rarely caught in time. The heavy metal debilitates the mind so slowly that any impairment usually goes unnoticed until it’s too late.
Poisoning from pure tetraethyl lead, however, works differently. It moves quickly. Just a few teaspoons directly applied to the skin can kill. After soaking the dermis, it leaches into the brain, and, within weeks, causes symptoms similar to rabies: hallucinations, tremors, disorientation, and death. It’s not a miracle motor drug. It’s concentrated poison.
Is it news that big business plays dirty? No, but the extent of the deception, and the planning behind it, is striking. And it lends credence to the view espoused by both environmental campaigners and neoliberal economists that “plastic recycling is largely a fraud,” as Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, an NGO that campaigns against the illegal waste trade, puts it. In reality, much recycling – and certainly the recycling of plastics – is an uneconomic activity that merely gives us “moral licence to pollute”, says Michael Munger of the American Institute for Economic Research. It’s akin to the “indulgences” sold by the pre-Reformation church to exculpate sins. Putting out your plastics for collection is not so much a rational economic act, more a “religious ceremony”.
